Freelance Tabloid Assignments...

MY CAREER as a papparazzo was neither deeply important nor long lived. It started out when I was freelancing in Washington DC and needed work to supplement my fledgling photographic career that was not moving fast. I got an assignment through the Uniphoto picture agency to see if i could make photos of the actor Robert Urich (who was dying of cancer at the time but still working and had a show at the JFK Center for the Performing Arts). I managed to get the photo showing his bald head (I really accosted the man outside his dressing room and still regret that intrusion to this day), but the Enquirer loved it.

So, I gradually got more assignments from the Enquirer. The work I did was not mostly dogging celebrities for candid photos. Rather, I was assigned to illustrate stories they ran that made up the real bulk of the human interest side of the tabloid that the 5 million weekly readers really liked. So, I shot everything from "Honest John" (where someone finds a huge amount of money and actually turns it in) to angry consumers (showing outrage at the anonymous "system") to women with multiple births (one in Mexico had six babies at once and she and her husband were shell-shocked).

Most of the photographs from this time are lost to the shoeboxes that hold negatives only. I'll be printing some of those and finding tear sheets to include in this space.